Five ways the next administration can help provide an affordable place to live for every New Yorker
The New York City mayoral primary was a rebuke to those who think Democrats have lost touch with voters. Nearly every serious survey found that affordability — specifically the cost of housing — was the issue most important to New Yorkers. After some early focus on public safety, the candidates fought principally for the title “Most Likely To Solve the Housing Crisis.” And the runaway winner was Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who stuck to affordability with martial discipline.
On substance, nobody truly rose above the field. For the most part, the plans offered by candidates Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Scott Stringer, Zellnor Myrie and others committed to producing ambitious numbers of new and mostly affordable apartments. Details of timing, cost, location and approach were scarce and mostly irrelevant. After all, primary election commitments are promises made with budgets that don’t exist, dependent on an economy nobody can predict.
Packed around the production goals were other proposals intended to signal a broader approach, and it is here that the candidates perhaps diverged. Cuomo threw up a blizzard of indiscriminate initiatives that tried to satisfy everyone and failed to build on the expertise he could have claimed as a former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Lander showed a mastery of detail and offered perhaps the only creative — if unrealistic — new idea, converting some city golf courses into housing. Only Mamdani broke through to voters, though, with piercingly clear rhetoric that communicated that he understood the urgency and scale of the crisis and that he wasn’t willing to accept half-measures. Wise or unwise, “Freeze the rent!” was a resonant battle cry.
While the candidates debated, the real action took place elsewhere. The Congress used its otherwise catastrophic One Big Beautiful Bill to expand the capacity of the Low Income Housing Tax Credits important to building multifamily housing at the local level. Soon after, the City’s Charter Review Commission advanced to the public a set of procedural reforms that, if supported by a majority of voters, would give the next mayor a flying start by streamlining cumbersome and time-consuming land-use reviews and weakening the power of local council members to veto rezoning proposals. All of this built on the passage earlier in the year of Mayor Adams’ City of Yes zoning reform and the ongoing neighborhood rezonings that aimed to ease the path to development in Midtown Manhattan, Long Island City and elsewhere.
Between now and Election Day, the public has another chance to assess which of the general-election candidates is best equipped to reverse the trend of more than two decades of insufficient housing construction and make the city a place where people of all income levels can reasonably hope to find an affordable home.
Like any chief executive, the mayor is a decision-maker. If they’re disciplined — think Bloomberg, not de Blasio — the city’s next leader will make a few critical calls every day and leave the execution to key players in the administration, holding them accountable for the results. So in the brief window between now and Nov. 4, it would be immensely useful for the major candidates to skip parading around “unit counts,” which are misleading, wishful thinking, and instead explain the principles that will govern their key decisions on the issue that matters most to New Yorkers.
Five key principles
What follows is one approach to New York City housing policy for the next mayor — a framework for policymaking, written not to help any particular candidate but to enable sensible policy choices that also have broad political appeal.
One caveat: Much of what follows concerns housing supply. The project of housing all 8 million-plus New Yorkers goes far beyond construction alone, encompassing the enforcement of tenant protections and the maintenance of existing units as well as other areas far beyond the scope of traditional “housing policy,” including the treatment of the mentally ill, the role of law enforcement in monitoring and oversight of landlords, and more. But supply is a big part of the picture, and it is as good a place as any to start.
This is what the next mayor should say:
The unwavering goal of housing policy should be to provide an affordable place to live for every New Yorker. There are five cornerstone principles that will guide the work of my administration’s housing agencies and that the public can use to hold government accountable:
- All-of-government approach: Every agency will play a role in solving the housing crisis, and they will work together with the urgency a crisis demands.
- A new relationship with landlords and real estate developers: City government and the real estate industry should be partners as much as possible, not combatants. City government will be fair, transparent, responsive and decisive with developers and landlords. Anyone seeking government assistance will be held to high standards, and housing agencies will have the resources to negotiate and enforce fair deals as well as to protect tenants from predatory behavior.
- Fairness: The housing crisis affects all five boroughs; every neighborhood will play its part in solving it.
- Public development: City government should aggressively look for ways to use its rich and diverse asset base to take a more direct role in developing truly affordable housing.
- Accountability: On Dec. 31 of every year, the Mayor’s Office will put out a clear and concise report of what was accomplished in the housing sector over the prior 12 months. This report will go much deeper than the production numbers have in the past. It will tell New Yorkers how their government is doing on issues that matter to them: Is it getting cheaper to rent a home? How long does it take people of all income levels to find an apartment? How have key housing statistics changed over the past year? The annual report will answer these kinds of questions, and the mayor will hold a press conference to explain every single number.
The fine print: Some examples of the principles in practice
All-of-government approach: Every agency that touches housing should meet monthly with the mayor to report on its progress, in a meeting dubbed “HousingStat.” Today, agencies are siloed, which means the simple act of renting up a fully built government-regulated apartment building can take months or years, while the Department of Buildings, the Fire Department and other agencies schedule multiple visits to measure compliance with outdated standards. Under an updated policy, the City should set a benchmark time period from completion to rent-up, and officials from the Mayor’s Office should use HousingStat to monitor compliance and promote accountability across the agencies.
A new relationship with landlords and real estate developers: The relationship between city government and the real estate industry is in many ways out of balance. Developers are supplicants when they need funding and are made to jump through bureaucratic hoops while understaffed agencies hack their way through years-long pipelines. But developers often try to make back profit margins by stacking subsidy upon subsidy, shutting out other worthy projects. Affordability commitments made to secure political support are sometimes treated as optional.
No more. The City should treat developers and landlords as equal partners, and demand they reciprocate. For example, the refusal by two consecutive mayors to hold the owners of Atlantic Yards to their contractual obligations is a disgrace and will never be repeated. The City should always take steps to enforce contractual obligations to protect taxpayer dollars and the rights of tenants.
The other side of the bargain is that the City must acknowledge that bureaucracy is a big part of the crisis and will take concrete steps to do better. Within 90 days of taking office, the mayor should have a plan to streamline archaic and unnecessary codes and rules, including establishing hard and fast timelines for City review, with the goal of speeding time to action.
Furthermore, the new administration should finally address the looming catastrophe in the rent-stabilized universe. There are reportedly many tens of thousands of vacancies in buildings whose landlords won’t rent apartments, because doing so would not yield enough revenue to cover their costs. By the end of March 2026, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) will have a plan to get these units fixed and filled. To be clear, some government money can get many units of housing back online, but this should not be a bailout. Many landlords will have to take tough terms or relinquish ownership as a condition of avoiding financial disaster. Rent-stabilized buildings were universally profitable until very recently, in part because landlords stinted on making repairs while rents went up and apartments eventually went market-rate. Again, this is part of rebalancing the relationship between government and the private sector.
Fairness: The City needs at least 1 million new apartments, and they must be built in every corner of New York. The mayor should direct the chair of the City Planning Commission to assess the city’s housing stock and set a timetable for a citywide housing plan. The goal: to support building where public dollars can go the farthest and make the most impact. To achieve this goal, the city needs to build housing that is affordable but also near transit and other critical amenities. Without question, there will be communities that will seek to reject these plans, but no neighborhood will get special treatment or be singled out. The plan should be available online and constantly updated — a living document.
Public development: Housing development is not the sole province of the private sector. New York City can use a wide variety of emerging and well-established models to build its own housing, which will have economic and social benefits.
This is hardly the first time in its history that the City has built housing. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the city’s largest landlord. Restoring livable quality to this critical source of low-income housing for at least 520,000 New Yorkers will be a priority. With the federal government taking another big step back from its housing commitments, the City should make multiyear funding available for public housing and will pressure the state to do the same. NYCHA also has an untapped opportunity to capture value for itself while helping solve the crisis: Its developments sit on an enormous amount of attractive land in every borough, and the administration should help NYCHA turn this incredibly valuable asset into thousands of new affordable units.
The Economic Development Corporation (EDC) should make the creation of new housing a priority. Lack of housing is the choke point for New York’s economic growth, so many of EDC’s noncore programs will be paused in favor of a focus on housing: no more “job retention” tax breaks for companies that were never going to leave. EDC should work alongside the primary housing agencies to ensure that housing goals are included in of its development work and will look for places to use its land-use powers aggressively.
Accountability. Every mayor since Bloomberg has finished each year by congratulating themselves for “creating” so much new housing — meanwhile, the deficit has only grown worse. Something doesn’t add up. Going forward, at the end of every year, City Hall should issue a clear report that tells the public what got done and what New Yorkers can expect for the next year. This report should include how many apartments were restored to affordability, how many new apartments will be built thanks to City action and at what rent levels, how much government funding from all sources was committed and spent and who received it, and how much progress has been made toward closing the housing gap by 2035. It should report on progress toward reducing the bureaucratic barriers to development and will lay out every commitment made by every developer. Each year, the work will start over again.
A reality check
There is no unitary solution to New York’s housing crisis. This city is land-constrained and has demographic and political currents that make the abundance movement’s sole reliance on increasing supply a partial solution at best. But without more supply, we have no way to get all New Yorkers housed.
The next mayor will have to start with an approach to governing that balances evidence-based policy goals with political reality — and let the details flow from there. If he tells the City how he’ll govern — and lets the voters hold him accountable for the results — he’ll not only make meaningful progress toward solving our housing problem, he’ll also take huge strides toward ensuring his place in the pantheon of great New York mayors.